Following his black and white photo-paintings based on magazine and amateur photographs, Richter's landscapes have emerged since 1968 as an independent work group in his oeuvre: black and white townscapes, mountain landscapes and park scenes, with hard, textured paint-surfaces, romantic seascapes and cloud scenes with the subtlest coloration and luminosity, landscapes that seem to dissolve before ones' eyes, or which are overpainted in an abstract style - as in the color charts based on color sample cards or as in the gray paintings, which in turn also provide the clue to their meaning.